


Kaninchen

by orphan_account



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-07-03
Packaged: 2018-04-05 17:29:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4188618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Undertaker pulled the cord and his-Ronald’s!- scythe made a huge, hungry growl, echoing through the tilting hallway. Distantly, there was a scream and the sound of breaking china.</p><p>Ronald fidgeted. </p><p>“Can I-?”</p><p>The scythe revved again, this time louder, and the Undertaker laughed out loud, possibly in delight although it could be hard to tell at times.</p><p>“Um, can I have that back?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Lovely Color Red

_

 

“Annabella Leese. Died of decapitation and blood loss on the 9th of April, 1889. Remarks: none.” 

The ship was tilting hard now, and he was having a hard time writing with one hand and pushing his blade-the gears made a horrific sound, mowing down the glass and the china that spilled over the decadent carpets. 

“Thomas Dickey, died of shock and…and blood loss…9th of April, 1889. Remarks…none…” 

He was gasping for breath as he rounded a corner; his whole body hurt and he was running scared, gloves ripped off his hands from the fight. The others had scattered to the winds-Grell, that demon, his master and the undertaker…or…or whatever he was-and the rumbling crowd of feet said the monsters-the hideous dolls?-were making very good progress in the first class lounge. 

He burst through a glass door, motor roaring and leapt into the air, smashing through three of the dolls and feeling gore splatter against his face, staining his glasses gray with brain matter. There were more, goddamn it, and they kept coming!

He thought about ripping into them, but the flood was coming down the stairs en mass and the idea of dealing with all of them at once was too stupid to comprehend. 

Where the hell was Grell? If she was chasing that demon, he swore to God he was going to rip her hair off or…or…or report her to Will. No, wait, she’d probably like that. He’d hide her glasses. That had worked before. 

 

His bloody gloves slipped and he dropped his book, pages spinning and cinematic records spilling like coins. Around him, they sprung to life, a screaming wail of human voices and human deaths and a frigid bright light so intense it hurt his eyes. The hideous dolls screamed and wailed at the noise and he recoiled, slapping his slippery gloves over his ears as ten thousand dead roared from his book, shaking the lounge until the timbers ripped and bowed. 

Fuck, he might get demoted for this after all. 

The records spilled over the floor, living snakes as he scrambled after them, grabbing great handfuls and dodging the grasping, slobbering hands of the undead around him. He could smell it on them-they were gone, all of them, he could taste it too, their records spent, remarks: none. 

He jammed the records into the book, nearly splitting the binding, ignoring its indignant screaming before he felt a hand grasp his shoulder and he had to shake free before he got a bite to the neck. He’d lost his coat somewhere, probably in that damn fight he’d been stupid enough to let Grell get him into, and had to awkwardly shove the book under his arm, trailing records as he heaved his blade around and ducked through the next passageway, kicking the door shut and hoping it would hold against the pounding of withered fists.

 

The screaming died as he darted down the servant’s hallway; even hear crystal chandeliers trembled with the force of the heaving boat and he couldn’t help but take a moment to appreciate just the style in which the humans were about to die. You couldn’t credit the human race for much, but if they were going to die, they knew how to go about it properly. A woman darted out of a cabin, saw him and screamed, whether that was from the blood, the records or his blade, it didn’t matter because there was the glow in the eyes and the distinctive smell; yep, she was a goner.

He leapt into the air again, weightless, as the door behind her exploded inward, the rush of frozen water impaling her against the wall. She gurgled once as water rushed over her and he had to precariously cling to one of the admirable light fixtures, blade hooked over his arm, crushing a new record into the already bursting book.

“Emily Elizabeth Foster, died from shock and blood loss on April 9th, 1889. Remarks, none.”

The record wailed as he crumbled it up and buried it into the spine of the book. He was never going to get that straightened out and he could already feel William’s look, breathing down his neck, presented with wrinkled, water-stained and improperly cataloged records. 

The water was up to his waist now, and colder than he expected; when he dropped down he gasped, dragging his blade with him until it hit the swirl of current with a great splash. The current threatened to sweep him off his feet; he slammed into the wall twice before he managed to scramble up the next flight of stairs and out of the greedy wet fingers, coughing, ignoring his shaking hands and the empty place where his heart had been shaking. There was a distant memory, still, of his lungs filling up and his hands grasping nothing, but luckily the iron gate to the next level was open and he shoved it free, dragging his blade with him.

 

He was back on the first class level, and it was quiet here, at least for the moment. He flung his blade on the ground, jammed his soaked shoes on top of it and yanked the motor twice. 

Nothing.

It took three more attempts before it roared to life again, just in time to quell a brief moment of panic because if he had to use another one of those standard issue reaper blades one more time, he was going to die all over again. 

Blade screaming, he ran down the quiet hall, sliding on glass and slowly dampening carpet. No sign of the hideous dolls yet, and also no sign of Grell and wouldn’t it just be his luck for her to run off altogether when they were nowhere near finished? They were going to need all hands on deck at this point, with people dying in the thousands and not enough of them to scoop them all up. He needed to get up to the main deck, where all of the dying would be. He rounded the next corner at breakneck speed, and he’d never screeched to a stop so fast in his life.

“Oh shit,” he managed before heaving another ungodly cough and spewing salt water all over the floor. 

This was just his luck. He was going to get cut in half, vomiting up half the ocean and 

Grell wouldn’t even finish the job, and he wouldn’t even get his own record in the library, and that’s about all a shinigami was good for, in the end. The scythe missed his throat by inches, the eyes in the death’s head gleaming. 

“Oh shit-fuck…”

His voice hurt from the salt but he revved the motor again, scrambling backwards and swinging the blade around, blocking another blow. He absolutely couldn’t do this on his own-three against one and they’d been dangerously outmatched. He was gonna die right here, right now and William would be so damn disappointed. 

The blade came down again, and he didn’t even try to block it, just ducked and rammed his shoulder into the wall, smacking his head good and proper and he would like to know how the Undertaker-or whoever he was-managed to wield that thing so damn fast because the point embedded itself just behind his neck and he struggled to breathe for a second. It ripped free and then-

“Wait!”

 

Ronald hadn’t actually expected to blade to stop, or at least not bury itself in his neck, but instead it went down with a rattle between his hands, landing on the handle of his own scythe, still rumbling on the carpet.

With a great whisk, his weapon went sailing down the hall and yes, there it went, right into the Undertaker’s hand.   
Astonished, Ronald flexed his hands once, a mangled record still sticking to his fingers. Briefly, he considered escape. Even more briefly, he considered trying to get his damn scythe back. He may as well have been a dead fish.

The great, magnificent death’s head had dropped unceremoniously to the floor, and a certain thief was patting the lovely little growling machine with a bit too much affection.

“Well aren’t you lovely?” he said, and damn it, he didn’t even sound winded. 

“Um,” Ronald tried. His mouth tasted like salt water. He hoped that Grell was working. 

He was going to get a write up for this. 

The Undertaker pulled the cord and his-Ronald’s!- scythe made a huge, hungry growl, echoing through the tilting hallway. Distantly, there was a scream and the sound of breaking china.

Ronald fidgeted. 

“Can I-?”

The scythe revved again, this time louder, and the Undertaker laughed out loud, possibly in delight although it could be hard to tell at times.

“Um, can I have that back?”

This drew a pair of green eyes back to him, and Ronald instantly wished he had never spoken once, in his entire life and his career as a shinigami. Speaking was overrated. 

“How loud can it go?”

Ronald blinked. 

“Um, pretty loud. If you hit that button-?”

He didn’t even get to finish sentence before the machine screamed again and he winced. His lovely little scythe usually only made that noise when he was trying to make an impression. It really wasn’t meant for that…or at least he tried not to over work it. He had to make it last until he got a promotion, and if Grell had anything to do with that, it might be another couple lifetimes. The horrendous noise his scythe made came to a stuttering stop and he glanced up, hopefully. Only to see the Undertaker petting the handlebar and cooing at the scythe.

“Aren’t you lovely? You are filled with all sorts of cogs and wheels and someone put so much effort into you. You are so very red. It is a good color for you.”

“I did that.” Ronald put in, feeling ridiculously jealous. “I made that.”

The Undertaker stared at him again, and Ronald got a prickling feeling that they were not speaking the same language. 

“What’s her name?”

The feeling was getting stronger. 

“Her-what? Her name? It doesn’t need a name.”

“Everything needs a name. That’s what gives it a purpose, a job. A name is what puts a soul in a body and a name is what binds curses to human beings. That’s how you ended up

being a shinigami, you know. You gave your name away.” The hair was standing up on the back of his neck, but he chose to focus on his irritation instead.

“Look, can I have that back? I need to finish my job before this whole ship goes down.”

“Not going to chase me any further, little shinigami?”

Ronald swallowed. “Are you kidding me? Three against one and we still got our asses kicked? No thanks.”

The Undertaker burst out laughing and pulled the cord again, and the whole hallway echoed. Ronald backed up a bit, ready to run, but the Undertaker just leaned down, picked up his own scythe and swung it over his shoulder. With a great push, he rolled Ronald’s scythe back up the tilted hallway and Ronald had to scramble for it before it went rolling right back. He had a brief, horrified image of Will’s face, but thankfully his hand caught the edge of the motor and he dragged it back up. He was going to have to wash a lot of salt off of her-it!-before he could reap again. 

omething tapped on his shoulder and he promptly fell on his ass, less than a foot away from the Undertaker and inches from the razor-sharp edge of the death’s head blade. 

 

“You were just doing your job,” the Undertaker said musingly. “I suppose William sent you here, with your partner. The one with the alarming hair.”

“Yes,” Ronald chanced.

“Well, I suppose I can’t help but forgive you then. I’d be more afraid of William than myself, if I were you.”

“I am.” Ronald agreed, before he thought that that might be a poor decision.

 

Green eyes crinkled up and the scythe swished away, only to be replaced by an offered hand, the skin pale and grayish. The hallway tilted slowly again, and Ronald decided to rely on the smile than the danger and allowed himself to be dragged to his feet. They hadn’t gone entirely unnoticed. 

Behind him, he felt a door open and slam into his shoulders, pushing him against the wall, and it looked like those hideous dolls had found their way down here. Two of them   
straggled out-a pair of women, clothes ripped, visible stitching staining their faces and their jaws ripped open, teeth glistening. A hand pawed towards his face and he couldn’t   
stop as he cringed away, the hideous smell filling his nose-  
But there was no rip in skin and no pressure. 

 

He opened his eyes, glasses still on his face, and the Undertaker had caught the beast’s hand and guided it away. The monsters paid Ronald no mind. They stared at the Undertaker with the blank, drooling gaze of imbeciles in the face of their creators. Mindlessly, they let him put a black-nailed hand on each of their heads and then, of course, Ronald’s glasses were again covered in gore. The two bodies slid down the hall. 

“I didn’t think you’d kill them,” Ronald chanced, gripping the handle of his scythe. 

The Undertaker turned back to him, blinking. “Why wouldn’t I? They didn’t turn out right, after all, and this is just a good first trial.”

Trial?

“Trial for what, the extinction of the human species?” Ronald said, before he remembered that speaking was one of his worst assets. 

The Undertaker laughed again, sounding disturbingly like a child. 

“I don’t think anyone wants that, kaninchen, or else who would we play with? But you have to wonder, don’t you? Think about it. What if there was…more.”

 

More? What was more? Humans were birthed, they lived, and they died miserable deaths and he knew this because he had firm experience. 

“What if they could come back?”

Ronald huffed, shaking his head. “That’s not how this works. It is what it is and…”

A sharp nail caught him under the chin and he froze, leaning back against the wall. The Undertaker was quite a bit taller than he was. Agonizingly, the nail dragged his head backwards and up, and he looked at empty green eyes and coarse gray hair. “You’re not thinking big enough, kaninchen. Think something more…dreadful.”

A bead of blood trailed from a long nail and down his throat and onto his salt and gore stained shirt. He was having a hard time breathing with his head tipped like this. He was stared at for a moment like a bug, before a new sound ripped through the hall. 

“Ronald! Ronny! Ronny, hurry up, we have to see this! You’ve got to see this! The whole ship is going down and the lights are amazing! Ron-ny, where are you?”

Ronald closed his eyes as the sound of a scythe revved up and the Undertaker laughed. His breath smelled like pine needles. 

“Think bigger, kaninchen. Bigger.”

 

And then he was gone, vanishing up the hall and Ronald stumbled at the loss of support, nearly losing his scythe down the hall again. Water was gathering again, and doors 

were slamming to his left. “Ronny, hurry up! I know you’ve been working, and I am telling you that you can stop, I’m your boss, come on! I want to have fun!” Ronald looks up and down the hall, and down at the bodies on the floor, half their heads missing and slowly sliding down as the sea yawned beneath the ship. 

“Ron-ny!”

His book of records screamed and he sighed, dragging his poor scythe behind him. It…she…it was probably already rusting. He didn’t bother to hurry-he knew Grell was probably still ripping off heads. 

 

William was exactly as displeased with him as he had anticipated, although he was pleased that Grell got the worse end of the stick. After the round scolding they got for   
allowing a rouge reaper to escape, Will didn’t even both to share his encounter. He had gotten away without a problem, after all, and he could always just leave that problem to   
someone else. 

He did, however, look up the strange word he had been called. He then had to go do paperwork for a while, in a huff, because no proper Englishman was going to stand for   
being called a rabbit for long.


	2. A More Satisfactory Experiance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I always try to think bigger,” Grell agreed, uninterested in the situation. “On whole, it is a more satisfactory experience.”  
> Something dreadful. Something dreadful even for them, even for the death’s heads, the harbingers, the crows feeding on the dead and picking up their souls. 
> 
> Something dreadful was coming. 
> 
> “Think bigger,” he whispered again, staring down at his sticky fingers. 
> 
> “I think I want a crepe,” Grell said behind him.

_

 

“I think you should do something with your hair, Ronald. I don’t think it quite suits your face.”

Ronald sighs, pushing his scythe rumbling down the cobblestone alley. This was the third time she’d brought it up, and each time she didn’t seem to remember the resolution from the previous attempt.

“I’m not going to change my hair,” he answered patiently. “I like it. I think it suits my face. And besides, it’s short, that’s nice.”

Grell lifted her delicately painted lips in distaste. 

“But it’s so…I don’t know. It’s so…”

 

“So?”  
“I don’t know. It’s too orange. Perhaps you should try black. Or red. Red suits everyone.”

Ronald sighed. He hated these conversations. It hurt him, deep inside, deep in his soul, that he knew his skin was a ‘winter’ and that he was not suited for summery colors. 

“It doesn’t suit me, remember?” he answers, calmly. “You told me that last week. You wanted me to wear that red jacket. You decided it clashed with my eyes.”

“It does clash with your eyes,” she replies firmly, tapping her scythe against her shoulder, the teeth digging into her skin. She doesn’t seem to notice them. Or the hypocrisy. All shinigami shared the yellow green eyes that made them look nothing but sickly. Even he could agree on that. 

“Auburn,” she decided at last, resolution ringing in her voice. “We should make your hair auburn. You’re a winter, you know. You should have jewel colors.”

“I know,” he answered, distractedly, untangling a wheel from one of the weeds shooting up between the stones. Around them, the tumble-down houses had shuttered their windows; despite the thick humidity of summer, they were in the business of staying closed until nighttime came. Here, they were surrounded by their kind, the humans that dealt with death. The embalmers and the broach makers and the photographers and their poles, arranging the dead in the lifelike poses, their little bits of glue holding empty eyes open. He liked that tradition, the photographs of the dead. It was interesting to see a pair of twins, one dead and one alive, the beginning and the end. They never had records, though. They were too young. There was nothing to see, from beginning to end, and they had done nothing in their brief moment on the universe. 

She was still talking. 

“I was telling William about it, the other day. He was going on and on about something, but I convinced him to try the color blue. Did you see his tie today? I think I have made real progress.”

“Are you sure we don’t have any other jobs?” Ronald asked, trying to derail the color conversation before they dived into a deep analysis of William’s tie, it’s color and texture and whether or not that meant he was, in fact, interested in a romantic relationship with Grell. She insisted that she would even settle for a sexual relationship. That conversation had been deeply uncomfortable and had lasted far longer than he had wanted. It was hard to get the idea of an unclothed William, his face his usual expressionless mask, out of one’s head after having experienced a blow-by-blow analysis. 

Fortunately, she was distracted. 

Her scarlet lips made a moue, put out and looking pretty. 

“No. One at a time. He won’t let us do anything else, you know, after that disaster on that ship. And she was so boring, too, wasn’t she? Some prostitute. You even got the record. How am I supposed to get any credit at all? He’s going to be so displeased with me again, and he doesn’t even like you.”

Ronald couldn’t argue with that. William tended to regard him with the same level of interest that one could reserve for an unusually ugly snail.   
In his breast pocket, he could feel the record warming against his heart. In his head, he heard her sad voice whispering about a life of alcoholism, broken hearts and useless dreams.   
There was always something so satisfying about this type of soul. 

“I can’t believe he is punishing us,” Grell went on. She never needed much response to hold her own conversation. “It’s his own fault for not sending in more, look at all those people that were on it! And why isn’t he more grateful for us trying to catch that one fellow? What’s his name? He was very good looking, you know. I wish he had paid more attention to me. I wouldn’t mind going against those two myself.”

Ronald, sensing danger, steered the conversation away from a specific demon. “He doesn’t blame us for that. He didn’t even know about him.”

Grell, as usual, was not paying attention. 

“Oh what was his name? I don’t even remember. Ronny, what was his name?”

“He didn’t tell us his name,” Ronald answered, annoyed. The nickname was a new affectation that he could not seem to shake, no matter how hard he tried. “It was the Undertaker, remember? That fellow the Phantomhives always dealt with, he builds coffins.”

Grell glanced through her surroundings. “We ought to go visit him. I’d like another chance.”

“There’s no way we can take him on two, that demon was-“

He snapped his mouth shut. He made a policy of never speaking the demon’s name aloud. Luckily, Grell was more interested in something else.

“That wasn’t what I meant,” she purred, patting her scythe. “There are other things you can do, Ronny. I ought to show you sometime. Isn’t that shop somewhere around here? We should go take a peek. Just see if he’s there.”

Ronald had a vested interest in not visiting that shop, but refused to outright say it. 

“Will won’t be happy if we take a side tour, remember? He told us to come right back no matter what. This was the first time we were allowed out since the ship thing, let’s not mess it up now.”

Grell was looking up and down empty side streets. A stray dog went loping away, loose trash littering the weeds. “Come on. It isn’t far. Let’s go. Let’s just see if he’s there. Won’t be William pleased? I bet he’ll be pleased. He’d like to know where that fellow is. Maybe he’ll take us for a visit himself.”

She was already off and running and Ronald had to take a quick leap to catch up to her, dancing across the rooftops, swerving in and out of chimneys. 

She was right, after all. They were in the dark side of town, the embalmers, after all, and they were on the road of the coffin makers, now, a brisk little side street, actually opened up for business. A few middle class workers slipped in and out, eyes red from tears, glass windows showing mahogany and silk and gold trim. For a split second, Ronald thought he’d have to catch her wrist before she jumped down into the middle of it, but she came to a quick stop at the edge and dropped her scythe beside her.  
“Here we are,” she declared, pleased with herself.

“He’ll be open, right? What should we do? I bet we can sneak up on him. He won’t be expecting anything right now, if he’s doing business with clients. We could probably catch him and take him to Will and won’t Will just be so pleased with us?”

“Wait, wait, just calm down,” Ronald said, waving his gloved hands, his scythe sliding down the pointed roof and catching on the gutter, rumbling slightly. “We’re not doing this, okay? Let’s just go back before we get taken off duty permanently and get stuck in the library for the rest of eternity. Doesn’t that sound nice? We can visit Will. He’ll be happy to see us.” 

He wouldn’t. At all. He was never very happy to see them. But at least coming back on time would probably soften the inevitable scathing commentary. And they probably wouldn’t be ripped in half altogether. He still remembered those hideous dolls. 

They stared at each other for a moment, and then Grell put her hands on the gutter and leaped right down to the front of the store, scythe rumbling.   
For a moment, Ronald thought about how nice it would be to just receive a write up for a change, and how much he missed just doing his job while Grell had been on probation. He’d worked to get her out. It was moments like this that made him regret ending his life altogether. 

But there was no scream and no laughter and no breaking glass. 

Instead, a curious voice said, “Ronny?”

He glanced at his own scythe, but he left her there, lodged on the roof. She’d only weigh him down when he was running for his life.   
He leaned on the gutter too and fell to the ground, his knees popping. 

Grell was standing there, scythe on her shoulder, and was staring up at the sign, a skulls head and the words ‘Undertaker’ emblazoned in blue paint.

“It’s closed!” She said, surprised. “Maybe we scared him off?”

Ronald stared at the sign as well. There was a notice pinned on it; he was too short to read it properly, but he could see the ‘closed’ written in firm letters on the bottom.   
“Or he’s out to a nice tea,” Grell said, still chatting away. “I’d like some tea sometime, we ought to go before we go back to work. We’re probably going to be late anyway, and I’d like a nice crumpet. You should take me out for a date, you know, Ronald, you owe me a few still. Show a lady a nice time.”

Ronald was ignoring her. Instead, he paced up and down the front of the building. Perhaps they had scared him off? But the windows were dusty, and a spiderweb clung to the edges of the door, a fat wolf spider spinning her webs. He reached out and she clung to his fingertip, crawling up to his wrist before he crushed her, liquid bursting over his gloves. 

He looked up again, at the swaying sign. 

The windows were empty. No wares were displayed. The tables and candles were gone; the interior was completely empty. Dust caked the floor and was too deep to have gathered since the encounter on the ship and the thousands of people lost. 

“He left a while ago,” Ronald said, mostly just to share his thoughts out loud. Predictably, Grell wasn’t listening.   
“Will should go to the theater,” she said thoughtfully. “There’s that lovely comedy in town.”

It wasn’t completely empty after all. 

Deep in the corner of the room hung the long tattered hat, abandoned, dust in its creases. 

“Think bigger,” Ronald said softly, rubbing the legs of the spider between his fingertips. “Something bigger.”

“I always try to think bigger,” Grell agreed, uninterested in the situation. “On whole, it is a more satisfactory experience.”

Something dreadful. Something dreadful even for them, even for the death’s heads, the harbingers, the crows feeding on the dead and picking up their souls.   
Something dreadful was coming. 

“Think bigger,” he whispered again, staring down at his sticky fingers. 

“I think I want a crepe,” Grell said behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next stop: the children


	3. Fortunately, He Was Sharing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I like your shoes,” the voice said.   
> “I-?” Ronald wheezed. The cloth on his throat was hard to talk through, but he tried his level best. It seemed rude otherwise. “I, um…”  
> “Where did you get them?”

-

 

He was sitting in a carriage of a train and feeling horrendously guilty. 

Fortunately, he was sharing a train car with a lovely young woman who was more than happy to chat about the odd case he had put in the luggage rack upon entering.  
She was a happy little thing with big brown eyes and a nice curl of brown hair and her governess, accompanying her to a trip to the country for her health, had conveniently fallen asleep some time ago, lulled by the rattling wheels of the train. Her name was Emily Fields and he knew she was going to die sometime soon by the smell of arsenic that clung to her black mourning dress and veil. 

For a girl who had recently lost her husband she was remarkably chipper; he could appreciate that in a woman. 

She was on her way to Cambridge University and was visiting a cousin there, studying law. Her governess thought a change of air would alleviate her grief somewhat. Emily appeared to view it as a delightful adventure that, from the way she was eying him, might open up some prospects for further romantic adventures. 

He was very open to the idea himself, but was, unfortunately, on a very tight deadline.  
When he glanced at his watch, she smiled. 

“That’s a tremendously interesting watch,” she said. “May I see it?”

For a moment, Ronald hesitated. It was a shinigami timekeeper-it allowed them to manage their shifts and alert them to the great tragedies incoming in their sectors, allowing them to allot overtime should it be necessary. But it looked like a watch, in a conventional sense, given a few extra dials and clicks.

So he extended her wrist and she looked at it, catching his arm and blinking at him coyly as she bent over the watch. 

“It’s very lovely,” she said at last, her lips inches above his gloves. He was rather surprised at the whole situation, grinned at her and replied, as was expected, “I imagine it would look quite lovely on your wrist yourself. It is a shame you must go without jewelry, you know.”

She laughed, flattered, and released his hand, glancing at the watch again. “My husband was a lovely man. The preacher at the funeral told me so.”

“If I may offer something to cheer your heart-?”

He was quite unable to resist a pretty, country girl, lost in a big city. So he reached into his breast pocket and signed away any forgiveness Grell might have for him after their last encounter over his stubborn refusal to allow her to use him as a dressing-doll for her latest disastrous dress attempt. He had eventually convinced her that he was much too short to be a model for her, and she had released him from her claws. 

In revenge, he had plucked up a pair of nice, black pearl earrings, and, with some gleeful malice, now handed them over to Emily Fields, a girl who would never know how angry she would make a certain shinigami with confirmed alarming red hair. 

She smiled in delight when she saw them; her hand flexed before she caught herself, and folded them demurely in her lap.

“You are very kind, sir,” she said, a smile in her eyes, “But you know very well I cannot accept such a thing from a stranger. You are hardly treating you like a lady.”

He shrugged.

“A lady should always have jewelry. It would be a shame to see your sadness go unadorned.”

She hesitated again, but reached out a lovely black laced hand and examined them, quickly, a blush on her cheeks. 

He leaned forward on his knees and watched her as she smiled over them, touching the shine on their surface. She was obviously unused to being spoiled with pretty things; he got the impression her husband, whoever he was, was no doubt one of those stodgy fellows who couldn’t appreciate a clean beauty when he saw one. 

Probably a Catholic. 

She was inches away from accepting them; she had tipped her head up with a smile, her fingers closing on them, mouth open for gratitude, when two things happened. 

Her governess woke up. Seeing her charge inches away from a remarkably alarming looking man elicited a very sharp, “Emily Ann Fields, what on earth do you think you are doing?”

The second was a man, walking past the glass door to their car, catching Ronald’s attention for the most fleeting of seconds. And that was precisely the amount of time it took for his ease to transform into complete panic.

Emily had opened her mouth, no doubt to assure her governess that the situation in which they found themselves was not at all what she (correctly) assumed it to be. Both women shrieked when he leapt to his feet and hauled his massive luggage bag down from the railing, disregarding the nice safety belts and letting them just snap free, hanging loosely from their bindings, swaying with the slow motion of the train.  
It hit the floor with an earth-shattering crash that made both women scream again. He bounded over to the short space to the nice glass-pained window and congratulated himself on the foresight of booking a first class passenger carriage; the windows were wide enough to make an unorthodox escape. 

“What are you doing?” Emily screamed, trying to rise to her feet and tripping over his massive case. Her governess merely settled for screaming again, pulling her feet up and dragging her skirts away as the luggage rumbled dangerously close to her matronly boots.  
“I beg your pardon,” He said to both women, ripping off his tie and wrapping his hand in it briskly. “Please cover your heads.”

Both women ducked and he slammed his fist into the glass, shattering it in a single blow and thoroughly regretting it the second the pain hit his hands. He was going to be picking glass out of his fingernails for a month.  
Glass teeth still clung to the sill, but were finally ripped free when he grabbed his luggage and flung it unceremoniously out the window, heaving hard enough to throw it free from the tracks. 

Up he went, onto the edge of the seat, foot on the window sill, just in time for the door behind him to slide open and for the terrifyingly familiar voice of his supervisor ask him, cold as ever, “Ronald Knox, what on earth are you doing here?”

As far as Ronald was concerned, there was no alternative now.  
With a brisk thrust, he was out and off the train, flinging himself into the air to avoid broken bones and tumbled to a stop inches from his luggage. 

He looked at his watch, gloves indeed speckled with glass.  
As far as he could tell, he had approximately three minutes before William managed a no doubt more decorous exit from the train and came to slap a ruler on his hands.  
So the luggage was kicked open and the scythe roared to life and he was off and flying through the air. 

 

-

 

It did not take him long to decide that England was, by far, the least enjoyable country in the world to take an impromptu romp through as rain came pouring down from the inevitable, humid atmosphere. He avoided hamlets in favor of the sheep-stained countryside, occasionally alarming a farmer or his flock as he roared through, accompanied by the symphony of barking dogs. 

Fortunately, he still had his watch. He had spent a very long time fixing his watch, and it pointed him the way he needed to go, right up until the very end, right up to the majestic front gates of Weston College itself. 

 

-

 

He was sitting on top of the blue dormitory, and feeling horrendously guilty. Not about the earrings. She had deserved the earrings. And now she would never find them and would probably complain and he did not feel guilty about that. 

But William was following him, and that meant he had noticed Ronald. 

Ronald made a point to go unnoticed by his superior; he preferred William to deal strictly with Grell and let her take the brunt of William’s disapproval. She craved his attention anyway. Ronald himself preferred to slip silently through the jobs, reaping souls politely and turning them in for the monthly quota and spending his free time chatting with pretty girls at bars and ducking Grell whenever she felt the need to discuss her deep inner feelings that were better left untouched from the minds of man. 

Still, she didn’t really deserve to be deserted upon all their jobs; not only was she going to have to do them all herself, but she would be expected to meet his monthly quota as well as her own. And apparently his increasingly common absences had been passed up the ladder, to the point where his final break for the country had been noticed well enough for William himself to come after him to drag Ronald back by his ear. 

Around him, crickets chirped. 

But there had been no sign of William and he sat alone on the top of the dormitory, staring down at the gravel walkway. 

Think bigger, he thought to himself. It was hard to ignore the hard scent of ash in the air. 

Below him, there was the soft crunch of gravel under elegantly shod feet, and there he was, the diminutive, and ultimately, despite his best efforts, unimpressive young lordling, the Earl of Phantomhive. 

The demon was nowhere in sight. 

Ronald tensed as the boy progressed down the lawn, and slipped through the gates, walking with purpose to the main building, his chest a bit puffed out with pride. The moon was bright and full, the light blue, and it was moments like this that Ronald got to most regret his nearsightedness. 

Still, the demon didn’t come. 

Ronald followed along the rooftops. He smelled it in the air, the chalk and the ash and the burning scent, the taste of marrow on his tongue and the fresh, cold scent of pine needles. It stung his lips, and he didn’t need his watch to see where he was going. 

Phantomhive knew his way around the school much better, and Ronald lost him for a while; he’d left his scythe hidden nicely outside school grounds, not wanting the sound of her wheels to alert everyone to his own running across the rooftops. He had no intention of talking to anyone tonight.  
He just wanted to see. 

-

He sat on the top of the wall and watched, hidden behind the bush. He watched the principle, sitting cold in his place, he watched the P4, and their elaborate rituals. He watched the Phantomhive boy and his gun, a flourish of arrogance.  
And for a while, he sat there, his ass getting sore, and he thought that, in the end, he had wasted his time, and William’s patience, for nothing.

The scent of pine was pervasive.

And then there was Derrick Arden-the boy they had killed? He was walking. He talked. He was…he was…

Ronald lurched forward, almost falling off his perch as blood spilled, as the demon was called, as shots rang out, as students screamed, and yes, there they were, the ripped stitches, the moans, and the…and the…and then the intelligent voices. Talking. They were talking now, moaning, but also talking, begging for tea.  
And then the principle tipped his head back and he giggled and that was all Ronald needed to know. 

As he ran, he heard the crashes, he heard the sound of scythes, he heard the screech of the demon’s nails on the stone, and he thought, to himself, bigger. Something bigger. 

Something greater than itself.  
And they talked and they moved.  
Something bigger. 

So enthralled was he by the potential end of humanity itself that when the sling of cloth wrapped around his throat he fell flat on his back hard enough to send his glasses flying and smack his head until he saw stars. 

For a second, he had to relearn how to breathe, and then a long hand with black nails appeared before his fuzzy vision and replaced the glasses on his nose.  
Gray hair was in his face.

“I like your shoes,” the voice said.  
“I-?” Ronald wheezed. The cloth on his throat was hard to talk through, but he tried his level best. It seemed rude otherwise. “I, um…”  
“Where did you get them?”

For a moment, he hoped that the Undertaker was joking, but he didn’t seem to joke around Ronald. Ronald didn’t appear to be worthy of humor. Instead, a pair of green eyes looked at him seriously, apparently awaiting an honest answer. 

“My, uh, boss made them for me?” 

Grell had been very pleased with how they turned out. He pretended to just wear them for her. But secretly, he loved them himself, and took very good care of them.  
“Oh. The one with the hair.”  
“Yes,” Ronald agreed, wondering how they had somehow managed to establish an understanding of communication in the now two times they had met. If there was a God, William would show up right now to stuff his lungs down his throat and hopefully scare off the fellow currently kneeling over his head. 

“You,” the Undertaker declared, “Are following me.”  
Ronald considered lying.  
He was shit at lying.  
“Yeah,” he answered. “Kind of. You kind of made an impression.”  
“You did too,” the Undertaker agreed. “Mostly the vomiting and the gore all over your face. I can appreciate brain matter.”  
“Yeah,” Ronald managed again. His head hurt. “I kind of assumed you would.”  
“So,” the Undertaker said, sitting back on his heels. “Can she make me some.”  
He had lost the thread of the conversation.  
“What?”  
“The shoes. Will she make me some?”

He thought about it, for a second, and then thought about why he had committed suicide and trapped himself forever as a shinigami. He could have gotten married and been an optometrist and had twelve children. 

“Um, yeah. Yeah, she’d love to. But…” He wasn’t super good at being manipulative. “But you have to, uh, tell me some things. First.”  
“Oh.”

They sat there for a while, in the fall and the slowly drizzling rain, Ronald on a bed of molding leaves and feeling bugs crawl all over his fingers. Any time William felt like showing up would be great, as far he was concerned. Superlative.

“Okay.”

Ronald stared at the clouds.

“So…why can they talk now?”  
“Because I know what I’m doing.”  
“And you, uh, didn’t before?”  
“Where’s your scythe? I miss her.”

“I do too,” Ronald replied, with real feeling in his voice. “I miss her a lot right now.”  
Raindrops were staining his glasses. 

“I made them better,” the Undertaker said. There was a grin in his voice. “Did you see the vice principle? He was my baby. He was magical. No one caught on so long. Maybe there could have been some motor muscle adjustments, and I probably could have made him last longer, but wasn’t he so nice? He was so nice.”

“Uh, yeah,” Ronald managed. He hadn’t noticed the vice principle at all, in the puddles of gore. But it didn’t sound good. “So you, um, want to make them last longer? Just physically?”  
“No,” the Undertaker said thoughtfully. “They’d be boring that way, wouldn’t they? I want to continue them forever.”  
“Forever?”  
“Yes,” a nail tapped his nose reprovingly. “Did I say that?”  
“So they need to be as smart as they were in real life?”  
“I want them to be themselves. From real life.”  
“Why?”

He had pushed too far. 

A face appeared, upside down, above his own, and he cringed at the smile. 

“You’re going to have to give me a most excellent laugh before you will get that answer, my little rabbit.”  
“I, uh-?”  
The Undertaker sighed, shaking his head, and dragging his coarse hair irritatingly all over Ronald’s damn face. “I’ll see you again soon, little rabbit. Run fast, now.”  
And then a hand came down on his throat and he went, uncomfortably, to sleep.

-

About two hours later, William came across his subordinate’s body in the middle of the forest, pushing said subordinate’s scythe in the most disapproving manner he could manage in his neatly starched suit.  
He stood there for a moment, taking in the bruised throat and the muddled glasses, and thought to himself that he was, in fact, not paid enough to deal with this nonsense.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Moving through the story quickly; need to work on actually finishing things when I start them. Next stop-France. I wonder what he was doing, in France?


	4. Tigers on a Gold Leash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Look at me.”
> 
> The voice never wavered, or raised an octave.   
> “You have to let me go,” he whispered again, but the hand on his hair yanked him back against the unforgiving door and this time he managed a genuine scream of pain, ripping his lungs to shreds. 
> 
> “We don’t talk about personal matters,” Will repeated again, as if he was stuck on repeat. “We do not discuss them. Ever.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Explicit violence. And we're off to France.

_

 

The thing with Mr. William Spears was that he was made from pure cut diamond.

Or he acted like he was. His shirt and suit were crisp until their creases cut skin; his shoes were polished until they reflected sunlight like mirrors, his hair was slicked and the color of an oil sheen. Everything about him screamed professionalism and restraint and total control over everything around him.   
Ronald could appreciate this sort of orderliness, given that he was lying flat on his back, still covered in mud and water and wet leaves, on a lovely glistening wooden floor, facing a perfectly polished mahogany desk, and a pair of those shoes. He could see his own face in them. 

His scythe was nowhere to be seen. 

Very, very slowly, Ronald placed his hands on the slippery slick floor and thought that it had never experienced such a mess of mud before. Exactly everything in his body hurt and he was pretty sure the back of his head was going to fall off entirely. There was a crack in the left lens of his glasses. 

Rising up on his knees, and yes, there appeared the rest of the man in question; his hands folded on the desk, thin, perfectly trimmed eyebrows gathered in a thunderous frown that somehow seemed to never blemish perfectly smooth white skin, his lips turned down and his flat, aggressive glasses glinting in the whale oil lamp. 

“Ronald Knox,” Mr. William Spears said, and briefly, Ronald heard the tolling of a death knell. 

“Mr. Spears,” He offered. His voice was sore and it came out like an undignified croak, but he figured it would probably be ridiculous to feel self conscious about that when he was on his knees in front of his boss in his shirt and waistcoat. He must have lost his coat somewhere. 

The ledger on the desk flipped open and a pen dipped briskly into an inkwell; it ran down a neat list, never daring to drip a drop out of place. Ronald saw, with a growing sense of horror, his own book lying on the edge of the desk, trailing some limp, wiggling records and looking about as battered as he felt. 

His scythe was nowhere in sight. 

“There was a considerable amount of activity at the college you visited,” William said finally, his voice brisk. “But it appears Mr. Anthony Rehms was dispatched to deal with any casualties and assess the situation on my behalf, and he did not report any further shinigami activity in the area. Meaning that you, as senior to Rehms, did not alert him to your presence and did not assist him with the gathering of records. Which goes against protocol. I must, of course, ask you why you were there.”

Ronald stared at him.

He looked at the list, and sure enough, there was Rehms’ name. He wondered how on earth he had managed to miss the junior reaper; he’d arrived only a few weeks prior and was very clumsy and unsteady still.   
Oh Rehms. You would be the death of Ronald after all. 

“I don’t think there’s really anything I can tell you?” Ronald offered. A long time back, when William Spears was appointed as his senior, he had sat down and weighed options of lying to him. He loved lying. But Spears was not to be lied to.   
There wasn’t any real reason to start now.   
“Nothing to tell me.”

The words fell between them, on the desk, and rolled like cold marbles. The lamp flickered. Ronald wondered, not for the first time, if Mr. Spears actually controlled the elements.   
“Well…no.” he managed at last. “I guess. I was sort of interested in what happened on the Campania, so I thought I’d poke around some?”  
His voice was weak, trying to minimize the damage, and he knew he was shrinking under a dominant gaze. 

“And how did you know this had anything to do with the events on the Campania?”

Another long, agonizing pause.

“Lucky guess?” he offered. 

For the very first time, he saw Mr. Spears break his character. One hand came up and he rested his cheek on it and stared at Ronald over the rims of his glasses and for a split second he actually looked tired. Diamonds didn’t look tired. 

“Mr. Knox, if you had had a lucky guess you probably wouldn’t have thrown your scythe and yourself outside of a moving train to avoid me.”

“Uh,” Ronald managed, ineloquently. “Yeah, I guess.”  
Another pause.   
The lamp flickered.   
Maybe the sheer force of his disappointment was causing the earth to shift. 

“So you’re not going to tell me how you came by this ‘lucky guess’, or why I found you in the woods in your…in your present condition?”  
He gestured with an elegantly manicured hand towards Ronald, who glanced down at himself. Yep, blood and mud and that was probably a stick in his hair. 

“I tripped?”

The problem with Mr. Spears and his rigid orderliness was that if a shinigami reported what happened, that was what happened. He did not believe in torture, like some sectors did. He was a perfect English gentleman, and he now faced a young man who clearly was not going to tell the truth even if faced with a disappointment that rendered all of London lightless. 

Despite the current situation he found himself in, Ronald Knox had always regarded William Spears with an awe and respect bordering on the worship of a god. He was what to be aspired to-restrained, emotionless, untouchable.   
So when William Spears leaned over and opened a drawer in his desk, Ronald waited where he was, even though his knees were killing him on the hardwood, knowing he hadn’t been dismissed yet. 

Mr. Spears placed an ivory handled revolver on the desk between them and Ronald stopped breathing. 

“When we found you,” William said, conversationally, “Your entire face was gone. Grell had to put it back together, you know, based on your records. She complained for days about how hard it was, and I still don’t think she got your nose quite right. You’d been there for a while and it took a bit of digging to get your records out of you.”   
Ronald had always heard that in moments of great shock, there was ringing in one’s ears from blood rush, but there wasn’t. He didn’t feel anything. He didn’t even look at William Spears; he looked at the ivory-handled revolver on the desk and stares at the splatter of blood on the muzzle, dried and brown.   
For a single, horrid moment, he remembered ducking, the Undertaker’s gloved hand reaching out and one of those doll’s heads exploding into gray brain matter.   
When he didn’t reply, William continued.

“Your records were full of holes; I don’t know why, I’ve never seen it like that before, it’s like a moth ate through them. I wonder what you did, for them to be like that. I wonder why you killed yourself. I wonder why you booked that room in that hotel and you stayed there for two days walking back and forth and getting drunk and fearing death more than anything else. But one night you got too drunk and well, here you are.”  
Ronald opened his mouth, but he could still feel brain matter trickling down his cheek and he could taste it in his mouth, hot and jelly-like.

It had tasted like curdled milk. 

William leaned over the desk, folding his arms, and peered at Ronald seriously, over the length of the gun. 

“I think you understand what I am trying to tell you right now, Mr. Knox.” He said. “But just in case…you make poor decisions. You are unreliable. You are irrational. And you are a coward. And that is why you are in front of me, dead at twenty-three and doomed to do this forever. You do not get to run away this time. You don’t get to wiggle out of your job, you do not get to abandon your post, and you do not get to run away. Ever again.”  
Ronald opened his mouth, and for a second nothing came out.   
And then what he said startled even himself. 

“You couldn’t protect them,” he said. Now the ringing sound was there; he couldn’t even focus on his boss, poised in front of him. “You couldn’t stop what happened to them. Every single one of them died and it’s your fault. All your fault. And here you are, you miserable bastard, because you were too scared to keep living and you ended up with a rock on your leg at the bottom of the Thames. We were all too scared, but it’s you that’s pointing a gun at me, it’s you that’s using my fear to control me, just like you torture Grell and you rub into her face that she’ll never be a woman. Because you couldn’t control them, so you control us now.” 

He had expected another terrifying silence, he had expected William’s rigidity, he had expect a waspish voice, he had expected the cold voice that rained hell down upon Grell and himself. He expected his god to be that: a marble being who destroyed with a tongue and eye. 

He hit the wall so hard he felt his ribs crack and break under the force, he felt the plaster in the wall give as his spine bowed and his head slammed backwards and this time it brought darkness; for a moment he struggled to clear his eyes and to breathe and to think-he had bitten his tongue nearly in half and was gasping out blood, spraying into the air. His eyes wouldn’t clear and he scrabbled at the plaster in a panic, shrouded in darkness, but he didn’t have to wait long-a gloved hand grabbed him by the throat and he was flying through the air again, landing and skidding across the wooden floor, slamming into door with force enough to shock his eyes back into focus.   
He gasped and regretted it; at least two ribs were broken and they stabbed his lungs-he tried to stand and collapsed, desperate to breathe, the air suddenly too hot, his skin covered with sweat. 

A pair of heels clicked across the now-bloody floor and those stiff, starched trousers knelt down.   
That hand was back, so tight around his neck at the point of his pulse that he gagged, moaning as his ribs and spine warped under the pressure.   
Slowly, he was dragged up the door; he could feel the beautiful paneling digging into his back, jostling his hips and legs painfully-he might have cracked his hip as well, from the way it wrested a scream out of him. 

He couldn’t breathe and thinking hurt. He could feel the vessels in his eyes bursting, the world a kaleidoscope of red and pink. 

He stood, by the tip of his toes, pressed back against the door, and finally, he could see again, through a thick window of pure agony. 

Mr. William T. Spears, a god made out of diamond, had the fire of hell in his eyes. Gone was the starch and the whiteness-Ronald’s bloodstained his hands and his face bright red, highlighting a vicious snarl and dripping off his hair, drifting around his face. 

He was half a head taller and Ronald struggled to keep his feet on the floor even as he coughed through the grip on his throat, through the tears running down his face, past the excruciating agony in the back of his head. 

“What are you saying?” William whispered. He was so close their noses touched and Ronald flinched away, trying to twist so he didn’t have to face him, only to be pushed back around, his eyes peeled open. William had black eyes. He’d never noticed before.   
“What are you saying?”

Ronald opened and closed his mouth twice uselessly, blood exploding out of his mouth, spattering over himself and all over William’s face, but he didn’t even blink, didn’t even move as his marble skin was stained black and red.   
The third time, he managed to speak. 

“Please,” he said, the only thing that ran through his brain. “I can’t breathe, you have to let me go.”

William tilted his head to the side, almost as if he didn’t understand. Ronald had no idea how old his boss was, and now he wondered. He had never seen anything that looked so totally empty. 

“I cannot believe you would say something like that,” William said, at last. “All those things you said about me.”  
“I’m sorry,” Ronald whispered, his tongue spurting blood with each painful contraction. “It was…out of line.”  
The world wavered around him.  
“You were out of line,” William agreed, his tone softening. “You were very out of line. We do not discuss personal matters.”

The animal part of Ronald’s brain cowered; he knew not to resist any further. But his eyes darted past his superior’s shoulder and at the ivory-handled gun.   
There was no way out this time.   
Hands grabbed his hair and he was wrenched around again; he screamed in startled pain.

“Look at me.”  
The voice never wavered, or raised an octave.   
“You have to let me go,” he whispered again, but the hand on his hair yanked him back against the unforgiving door and this time he managed a genuine scream of pain, ripping his lungs to shreds.   
“We don’t talk about personal matters,” Will repeated again, as if he was stuck on repeat. “We do not discuss them. Ever.”

Through the red haze, Ronald could feel the corners of his eyes blackening-he probably only had a few seconds before he was gone again. 

“William…”

The fingers tightened and he didn’t bother to hide his choking, reflexive tears streaming down his face as he gasped harshly.  
And then it was over.   
He hit the floor so hard he thought he might crack it in two. There were two seconds of pure, blind relief.  
William walked back to his desk and sat down. They regarded each other again. 

“Your scythe will be removed from your custody,” his superior said, as if his face wasn’t covered in blood, as if his hair wasn’t dripping in it, as if there wasn’t a smashed indent in his wall, as if the floor wasn’t a mess of blood and mud. “You will be reprimanded to the assistance purely of a certain Grell Sutcliff until further notice. Please remove yourself from my office. We have nothing further to discuss.”

It took exactly one attempt to stand to knock Ronald Knox right back out. 

_

 

It had taken some coaxing, but Grell was talking to him again.   
She had been devastated by his disappearance, and William’s sub sequential bad mood. Much less being forced to monitor Ronald full time. He had finally appeased her by allowing her to tie him firmly to a chair (“So you finally hold still this time and I won’t poke you in the eye!”) and try to cover up the nasty swelling and colors peppering his face, full of burst blood vessels and cracked bones. Her vast kit promised some success in what looked like a doomed failure. 

“So,” Ronald said, voice slightly strained, still tied to his desk. It occasionally hurt to breathe.  
“Will you do me a favor?”  
“Oh Ronny,” Grell replied, tapping her blush brush daintily in her cup. “What could you possibly want from me?”  
“I have a…friend.”  
“You do?”

Ronald glared at her. Like he had at her suggestion of false eyelashes. 

“Yes. I do. Kind of. He liked your shoes.”  
She claps her hands together in delight, powder puffing up into the air. “Oh, I told you so, I told you they were perfect! And now people agree with me and not you and now you have to-!”  
“No, no, see…” Ronald broke in. “He kind of wants you to make him a pair.”

Grell blinked at him. 

“He liked them that much,” Ronald coaxed.   
She was tearing up.   
“But I need some help too!” He broke in, before she started wailing. “I need you to do something about William!”  
That was enough to bring her firmly back to earth.   
“William?” she asked, puzzled. “What about him? He told you not to go anywhere you know, and I don’t blame him, seeing how you ran off and came back in this state. He’s barely talking to even me, and I hope you know how much that upsets me.”  
“I know,” Ronald said in the softest voice he could possibly manage. “And I don’t like seeing you upset. Or him. And I know how well you two get along.”

Grell, unfortunately, was not stupid.  
She leaned back and narrowed her perfectly lined eyes at him. 

“You want to leave again.”  
Ronald weighed the pros and cons of lying to her, but then, the last time hadn’t gone so well.  
Bruises snaked from his tailbone into his hair. He had lost some hearing in his left ear. 

“Well, yes. I want to find my friend again.”  
“And your friend is…?”

Ronald shrugged and regretted it. 

“You know,” Grell said as she picked up another pot and patted the color onto the delicate skin under his eye, still green with bruises. “You’ve been awfully strange ever since that ship, Ronny. And when we visited that little shop. You’ve been out of sorts and now look at what happened to you. You ought to take better care of yourself. I worked hard for you.”

Ronald managed a slightly hollow sounding laugh, the images drawn from his conversation with William burning in his brain. 

“I know. I appreciate it. So much. You’re such a wonderful help, you know.”

Grell smiled, pleased with herself and everything she had ever done. She was, as always, remarkably successful.   
Ronald licked his split lip and tasted salt. 

“But I can’t hang around here. I’ve…I’ve got something to do.”  
“And what is that?”  
“I’ve got to find my friend,” he repeated, watching her.   
She stared at him, and then her eyes slowly widened.   
“No, wait-!” 

He knew that expression. 

“Oh Ronny, I had no idea! Why didn’t you tell me before? I would have helped you right away and you could have avoided all…all this!”   
She gestured wildly to his general person, fluffing his shirt and waistcoat with beige powder. 

“Oh Ronny, you should have told me! I know everything that you need-do you need a confidant? You can tell me anything, cross my heart, it will never leave this room!”

It was a peculiar sensation to be tied to a chair directly across from a woman, face streaked with what he could only assume was pride and brandishing a complex cosmetic case. 

“You must tell me who it is, I can help you find them! What’s their name? Is it your friend? It’s your friend isn’t it? Oh Ronny, is he lovely? What’s his name? You must tell me his name! I bet he’s gorgeous, I never pegged you for-you always flirt with the ladies, I had no idea! Ronny, you’re keeping secrets from me!”

Briefly, Ronald thought about kicking her in the crotch, but then remembered he was tied to a chair and probably couldn’t run away even if he desperately, desperately wanted to.

“Ronny!” she cried, expectantly. 

This time, he didn’t bother thinking about it. He was fucked either way. 

“Uh, yeah,” he said, tongue still sore. She wouldn’t need much in the way of convincing. “Yeah, I guess he…is. I can’t tell you his name, it’s a surprise?”  
“A surprise?” She demanded, annoyed. “But what am I supposed to do with William? Are you bringing him back? I don’t understand!”  
“Yeah, he’s coming back with me,” Ronald lied wildly. “But you know how William is, I’m not supposed to leave…isn’t there some kind of unrest in Germany? Why don’t you go talk to him about that? Why don’t you and he go on a little bit of a vacation? He was wearing a blue shirt the other day.”

She stared at him, her mouth agape, and then slowly closed it. 

“But I need my scythe,” he added hurriedly. “You know, in case of, uh, danger.”  
“Oh,” she said, numbly. “I have that. Somewhere. He gave it to me to keep you out of trouble. But this isn’t trouble! Oh Ronny, I can’t wait to meet him! Do you really think William will want to come with me? I can’t even imagine-!”  
“Of course he will,” Ronald replied firmly. He was ready to be untied. “He’d love to. He’s been meaning to ask you for forever. You didn’t notice the blue? Even his cufflinks. Even I noticed!”

He hadn’t noticed the cufflinks. The shirt was true, though. It was probably a coincidence. 

She pursed her painted lips, and then nodded firmly.   
“Even if it weren’t for William…and I’d love to help him!…but I can’t stand in the way of you finding love. You mean so much to me, Ronny! I don’t suppose it would hurt to give you your scythe, just for a while. You’ll be back soon, right? He’ll be ever so grumpy.”

Ronald had felt grumpy before. He nodded though. “I completely understand. I never want him to be angry with you,” he said, with real feeling that she completely missed.   
Instead, she clapped her hands together.   
“Oh Ronny, I’m so happy for you!”

Behind him, he twisted his hands, feeling the rope dig into his pulse. 

-

 

He was standing on a train station, a heavy piece of luggage beside him, a coat down to his wrists, gloves and a heavy hat to hide the horrific bruises and cuts still standing out on his skin.   
Around him, humans streamed, talking and crying and laughing. He could taste on their skin when they would die, when they had records, when they were important and when they would sink to the bottom of heaven unnoticed by even the most empathetic of angels. 

The whistle blue and he looked up.

A great black train wound its way to a stop before him, a new flood of people disembarking.

All around him, the spoke French.


	5. Last of the Lost Boys

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “He had someone with him? That’s the first time I’ve heard-I’ve never seen anyone with him. I don’t know why-I don’t?”
> 
> The boy was staring at him and his stuttering with surprise. 
> 
> “Oh, you know him that well?”
> 
> “Well, no, but…he doesn’t seem like the type to socialize. You know. Being…being intensely scary and all of that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More like a half chapter. Next chapter is very action heavy and would be awkward to post with this.

_

 

 

He was sitting on the edge a roof, four stories up from the cobblestones, and chain-smoking his fifth cigarette of the night when he got caught. 

 

Below him, the streets still flickered on and off with dim lights, occasionally tendered to by a lamplighter, a boy with a pack of kindling larger than his shoulders. The only people out now were the poor-the factory workers, the artisans, the loiterers and the drunks, the boys and girls of the night. 

 

The city here smelled different, a different kind of sweltering heat, ten thousand foreign bodies. He could hear and smell them dying in droves, living insignificant and uninteresting lives, no stamps and no records, but he kept his hands to himself and his box of fancy French cigarettes. He had tried to stop smoking when he was alive, mostly because of what his mother had diplomatically called his ‘delicate disposition’ and what everyone else called a hazardous attraction to the common cold. 

 

As a shinigami, he had bought six boxes in the day alone and his fingertips were shiny with gray carbon.

 

His scythe sat next to him, braked against the gutter and purring her motors reassuringly, a surprisingly nice companion for another night spent looking over an unfamiliar maze and listening to ten thousand unfamiliar heartbeats. 

 

He had been totally ignored, even with a green and blue face and swollen lip, and he had been very polite as well, keeping his presence at a minimum and ignoring the records clambering in his ears. 

 

This wasn’t his district. 

 

Will wouldn’t just beat the shit out of him-it would go higher up the ranks than that, and Ronald wasn’t even sure what exactly the punishment for such a trespass would be. It just simply wasn’t done. 

 

“Hey, you’re going to set the roof on fire.”

 

Ronald startled so hard he lost his cigarette, plunging four stories down to deeply confuse a passing washerwoman. He nearly lost his scythe too as she tipped, but a small, neatly gloved hand reached out and caught the handle, tipping her back. 

 

Ronald blinked. 

 

“Oh, sorry, uh. I’m just passing through. I haven’t done anything, you know. I’m English.”

 

The boy sat down beside him, dangling his legs over the edge. He was a shinigami in miniature; men’s clothes scaled down and detailed to perfectly suit what appeared to be a fourteen-year-old body. 

 

Grayish green eyes stared up at him from rimless glasses  
.

Ronald shifted uncomfortably.

 

“I haven’t been reading records,” he said. “It’s okay, you don’t need to report me to anybody.”

 

The boy laughed. 

 

“Oh you’re English all right, listen to that accent. It’s okay. I haven’t been reading records either.”

 

Ronald frowned at him, then reached into his breast pocket and pulled out his last box of cigarettes.

 

“And you’re not French.”

 

“No, thank god,” the boy answered. “My name is Sascha. Ich bin von Düsseldorf. In Deutschland.“

Ronald’s total experience with Germanic people involved their excellent production and shipment of beer to be found in some of the nicer bars in the West End. He frequently made it a point to spend a weekend visiting that beer, usually after Grell had decided to make another attempt at William’s dignity and person. 

 

But he could recognize an accent when he heard one.

 

They regarded one another, a pair of trespassers, and then Ronald flicked the box open and offered Sascha a cigarette.

 

The boy took it, and accepted the light with the ease of someone who had spent far too long engaged in bad habits. 

 

„So,“ Ronald said, watching the miniature shinigami draw in a drag. „Why are you in Paris, France, in the middle of the summer and sitting on a rooftop when we both know neither of us should be here.“

 

Sascha shrugged and tapped the cigarette, dashing ash into the wind. 

 

„Same reason as you, I expect,“ He said, exhaling through his nose. „Those bodies.“

 

Ronald looked away to give himself time to think. 

 

„Well, yes,“ he said at last. „I was on the Campania. You’ve heard about that?“

 

„Oh yes,“ the boy replied. His book of records sat on his lap, a huge thing that looked much too large for small hands to handle. „Everybody has heard about that. All the fun is wasted on the English, my boss said.“

 

“Hey, we do our fair share,” Ronald argued, with no real malice. “Do they know what happened-what really happened?”

 

“Some of them do,” Sascha said with a shrug, the neat little shoulders of his suit crinkling. “I do, anyway, but that is because everything is so interesting here. I look all over the world to see what we are doing. Did you hear about the gang wars in New York that are going on right now? Amazing stuff, the forces are out in full and I hear they’re having to recruit extras to come in from Indianapolis or Chicago, and that’s saying something, as if Chicago didn’t have enough on it’s hands already.”

 

Ronald’s grasp on America and American politics was even vaguer than his grasp on the Germanic people, probably because they did not produce that most excellent beer.

 

“The bodies were on the Campania, they started there,” he explained. “And their creator was there too, and I’m looking for him now. I think he’s in Paris.”

 

Sascha laughed, a puff of smoke from his cigarette. “Oh you English, it’s always your fault when something silly happens, isn’t it? I know what you mean, anyway. My partner doesn’t believe me, of course, which is why he’s left me here, but I suppose he cares in a way because he’s keeping the world off my back for a while I waste time. Something I’m sure you can relate to.”

 

Ronald would neither confirm nor deny the suspicion. 

 

He settled for tapping the long column of ash free and watching it fall into the wind.

 

When he didn’t respond, Sascha took the initiative. 

 

“I know that it started in England, and I’m here for the same person you are, so I suppose that makes us allies.”

 

“So what do you call him?” Ronald asked, staring at the stars.

 

“Der graue Mann, nobody knows his name anyway. Do the English?”

 

Ronald shrugged.

“No, but then, I’m the only one looking.”

 

“Well, you don’t have to look anymore,” the boy said, suddenly all business and stubbing out his cigarette. “He’s here, I saw him just this morning, but I think he saw me following him. I thought he’d just leap off, he’s done it before when I caught him, but he didn’t this time. He just grinned at me and he’s got awfully pointy teeth, you know?”

 

“I wonder why he stayed,” Ronald asked aloud, staring at the mostly empty street. “He always runs off.”

 

“Well, he didn’t,” Sascha said firmly. “Probably because he had someone with him.”

 

Ronald blinked at the stars twice before he turned his head back.

 

“He had someone with him? That’s the first time I’ve heard-I’ve never seen anyone with him. I don’t know why-I don’t?”

 

The boy was staring at him and his stuttering with surprise. 

 

“Oh, you know him that well?”

 

“Well, no, but…he doesn’t seem like the type to socialize. You know. Being…being intensely scary and all of that.”

 

Sascha drew his feet up onto the gutter and toed at the leftover rainwater and grime. “I don’t see why it’s so strange, but if you say so. I’ve never seen him before either, so maybe he’s from Paris.”

 

Ronald stared at his hands.

 

“Maybe. Um, where did you see them?”

Sascha grinned again, mischievous. “I could show you. In the morning. But you have to tell me stories first.”

 

“What-stories? What stories?”

 

“The English always have stories. Tell me some stories and I’ll take you there tomorrow morning.”

 

Ronald looked at him. Then he looked at the cigarettes and the moon, high in the sky. 

 

And then he began to tell stories. 

 

_

 

It was noon and Ronald was beginning to consider redesigning his scythe into something…smaller. And lighter. And possibly easier to conceal to the average, every day fellow as they attempted to pass unnoticed through the streets. 

 

Sascha trotted along beside him, his own case slung to his hip across his chest and bouncing along with every stride. He hadn’t shared what his scythe was, and Ronald didn’t ask; it was a tremendous breach of social etiquette in England and he felt he could expect the same from Germans. 

 

To him, they appeared to be heading deeper into the city, the buildings getting taller and louder, the people and businesses more and more practical and industrialized. 

 

“There,” Sascha declared, stopping and ducking under an awning. 

 

They were in the metropolitan area, surrounded by bistros and signs and steps away from the giant palisade of the Gare de Lyon train station.

 

The charcoal smoke filled the air, and people loitered under awnings, eating ices and creams and waiting for the next stop, posted on pillars and neatly scheduled. Every few feet was a ticket booth, employed with a smartly dressed, smiling young woman, ready to tender cash and tickets alike. 

 

“A train station?” Ronald asked, unable to hide the defeat in his voice. “They were at a train station? So they’re gone then? And who knows where they’ve gone, too.”

 

“They’re not gone,” Sascha replied, rolling his eyes. “I saw them here yesterday. The tall black-haired man he was with was buying tickets. They were sold out for the day, so they have to come back tomorrow.”

 

Ronald stared at his diminutive companion, who looked back up at him, unaffected. 

 

And then he stared up and down the terminal.

 

“You could buy me an ice cream while we wait,” Sascha offered. 

 

It had taken about half an hour of coaxing and another of outright abuse, but they sat in 

the sun together, the boy with his legs up and pleased with himself, eating strawberry, and Ronald, arms on the back of the bench, glaring as the great black behemoths rolled their way in and out of his life, filled with meaningless records.

 

Once or twice he caught the eye of another reaper, slipping through the crowd, but they never noticed the two foreign shinigami-they were much too low level to sense them, in the dense mass of people. 

 

Occasionally a child would point and tug their mother’s hand, excited by the weirdly shaped cases and by one of their own, dressed so strangely. Sascha waved and gave them a pink smile and the women universally looked touched, pulling their own brood on. 

 

Ronald had a sneaking suspicion they thought he was a proud father. 

 

Occasionally, he pulled up his wrist and watched the time. 

 

“There,” Sascha said, quietly, the last of the crisp waffle crumbling over his gloves. “Over there. By that turnstile. Don’t stare, he’ll see us and he’ll probably eat us.”

 

“He’s offered,” Ronald agreed, but kept his head forward, peering out of the corner of his eye through the reflection of his lenses. 

 

People, people and more people and there it was, a swish of gray hair, slipping through the masses. It was hard not to appreciate style when you saw it-while Ronald and Sascha garnered curious stares, the Undertaker swerved through the crowds entirely unnoticed, his odd hair, clothes and eyes drawing no comment, eyes sliding over him as if he just wasn’t there. 

 

And Sascha was right. 

 

Walking behind him was a tall man, dressed impeccably, gloves on his hand and a beaver fur hat on his head, the very height of fashion, with thick dark hair. His head was turned away, facing the Undertaker and they appeared to be talking closely about something. 

 

Ronald frowned. 

 

“Who is that?”

 

Sascha licked his sticky fingers. 

 

“I dunno, but that’s the fellow he was with yesterday. Look, see, he even has tickets.”

 

“Why would he need tickets?”

 

Sascha shrugged and looked at the paper wrapping, inspecting it for any unnoticed drops. 

 

“We can move quickly, but he obviously can’t, so he must be a human of some sort. I guess they are going to get on the train and leave today, look.”

 

The black haired man was indeed vanishing into the train, the Undertaker behind him, a hand on his back. 

 

Ronald shot to his feet with a surge of panic. 

 

He grabbed for his case but it was unnecessary; in the doorway, the Undertaker turned and smiled at him, his eyes slits, and flicked his finger-come here.

 

Ronald hesitated. He looked from the mouth of the train back to Sascha, and back again. 

 

“Go on,” Sascha said. “I’ll meet you in Germany.”

 

The train began to roar to life and Ronald had to leap to his feet, sprinting to catch it, and sending people back in waves as he dragged his case through the crowed. 

 

He leapt up into the doorway, just managing to catch it before it was out of reach, the Undertaker long since vanished. 

 

He dropped his case and stared out the window, hair whipping as they gathered steam. Sascha waved at him, licking up the last drop of ice cream, and it was right about then that Ronald had the presence of mind to wonder where they were going. 

 

I’ll meet you in Germany.

**Author's Note:**

> The Undertaker appears to be becoming a major villain, now doesn't he?


End file.
